I

The rapid rise of the East India Company (EIC) in the second half of the eighteenth century has frequently been identified as a watershed in British imperial history, as the EIC's growing muscle began to tug British imperial interest and endeavour to the East at the very moment its Atlantic empire was plunged into crisis by the American Revolutionary War. In his The scandal of empire, Nicholas Dirks examines the changing place of the EIC in British understandings of empire and sovereignty.Footnote ¹ Dirks attempts to demonstrate that scandal was the ‘crucible in which both imperial and capitalist expansion was forged’ and that scandal was ‘endemic’ to the operations of the EIC.Footnote ² He contends that Edmund Burke's condemnations of the former governor of Bengal, Warren Hastings, were pivotal to the reshaping of empire's meaning. He suggests Burke's critiques allowed the empire to be refashioned into a moral undertaking, where British sovereignty and commerce would be powerful engines for improvement, masking the real nature of imperial exploitation. Ultimately, The scandal of empire claims that ‘in bringing Hastings to scrutiny before the combined houses of Parliament, Burke had made empire safe for British sovereignty’.Footnote ³

Most importantly, Dirks claims that the EIC's imperial ambitions in India were shored up by the displacement of scandal from the corruption of British agents of empire-building to the supposedly corrupt religious and cultural practices of South Asians. There is certainly no doubt that British denunciations of certain South Asian practices and the colonial state's drive to suppress thagi and sati were significant elements in the political economy of the EIC's dominance in South Asia, but The scandal of empire does not deliver enough careful argument and is insufficiently grounded in archival analysis to substantiate Dirks's thesis. Unfortunately, his use of scandal as an analytical lens lacks precision and is unconvincing: although he frequently asserts the centrality of scandal in the operation of the empire, he does not effectively demonstrate the ways in which scandal actually drove wars of conquest or enabled the extension of colonial authority on the ground.

Throughout the volume, Dirks draws direct parallels between eighteenth-century British empire-building and contemporary American foreign policy, especially the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Some of these are suggestive, but in striving to sew George W. Bush's America and Edmund Burke's Britain together, Dirks strips away the complexities of the 1780s and produces a flat and mechanical reading of imperial politics. And in dismissing not just Victorian scholars of empire, but also the value of much contemporary work, Dirks produces a reading of recent historiography that is hectoring and one-dimensional. Dirks does not engage with other important works on scandal and resolutely ignores a large and sophisticated body of scholarship that has rematerialized the place of the empire in shaping British politics and culture.Footnote ⁴ It is only possible to suggest that ‘the erasure of empire from the history of Europe’ remains unchallenged if we ignore the value of the large bodies of work on imperial questions in British politics, the impact of slave trade and slavery on Britain, the place of the ‘fruits of empire’ in British cultural and commercial life, and the influence of the empire on British literary production.Footnote ⁵ And, in a similar vein, we really have to discount a whole library full of monographs produced over the past two decades if we are to accept that ‘the devastations of imperial rule on the colonized, and the extent to which the struggles and challenges of postcolonial regimes are themselves critical legacies of colonial rule are discounted’ in recent writing on the history of British colonialism in India.Footnote ⁶ These overreaching claims are jarring and they detract from some deft passages of analysis in the middle of the volume.

Ultimately, The scandal of empire will be primarily of value to future historians of American intellectual life who want to assess the debates around the American invasion of Iraq, but this is not a work that really pushes the historiography of colonial India or the British empire in any new directions. The analytical tone and temperament of H. V. Bowen's Business of empire stand in stark contrast to Dirks's work.Footnote ⁷ In this important monograph, Bowen examines what P. J. Marshall characterized as the transition from ‘trade to dominion’ in British endeavour in Asia or what Bowen identifies as the EIC's shift from being ‘a vast empire of business’ to becoming an organization that was ‘devoted to the business of empire’.Footnote ⁸ Bowen reconstructs this transition with great care, in particular tracing the relationships between the EIC and influential moneymen and politicians in Britain whose influence powerfully shaped the EIC's institutional development.

The business of empire offers a rich and nuanced picture of the changing structures and practices that shaped the EIC's operation between 1756 and 1833. Essentially, Bowen's work demonstrates the ways in which the EIC's access to land revenues from India exposed it to new pressures and how, in response, the EIC created new managerial structures, decision-making systems, and relationships with investors, stockholders, and key political figures. Bowen has little to say about the workings of the EIC's operations on the ground in India and he also avoids any sustained engagement with questions relating to the EIC's place in reshaping global patterns of trade. His focus is firmly on the metropolitan element of the EIC's development: but there is no doubt that the resulting work is an important study of institutional transformation that casts great light on the complex ties that connected London to the provinces and increasingly wove India into British economic and political life.

While firmly rooted in economic and administrational matters, Bowen's volume offers valuable cultural insights. It makes an important contribution to ongoing debates over the role of the empire in the transformation of the metropole. His introduction offers a lively discussion of recent debates in economic history over the significance of colonial trade in the transformation of British commercial patterns and the emergence of industrialization. He argues that the EIC's operations in Asia generated ‘stronger domestic economic impulses than have hitherto been recognized by historians’.Footnote ⁹ By tracing the ‘ever widening circle’ of the EIC's connections with Britain, both in London and in the provinces, Bowen compellingly demonstrates the centrality of the EIC in the entanglement of British domestic life with the empire. In a passage that directly undercuts recent work – which frequently appeals to crude economic measures – that is sceptical of the domestic significance of the empire, Bowen argues

Bowen also demonstrates the centrality of writing in the EIC's operation, underlining the absolute centrality of dispatches in shaping metropolitan interpretations of events in distant India as well as conveying instructions and orders from the EIC to its agents in India. This is a very important exegesis of the growing importance of the written word in British commercial life in the later eighteenth century as well as a compelling assessment of the ways in which distance, time, and communication technologies mediated colonial action.

Writing as an administrative practice is at the heart of Zoë Laidlaw's Colonial connections.Footnote ¹¹ This very important study produces a finely grained reading of the shifting dynamics of imperial governance in the ‘Age of Reform’ as it undercuts long-established images of the Colonial Office. Laidlaw maps the shifting contours of the various personal networks that linked colonial functionaries, metropolitan politicians and opinion makers, and Colonial Office officials. Unlike earlier work on the Colonial Office, Colonial connections balances close knowledge of practices and debates in London with detailed archival work in two colonial sites, in this case New South Wales and the Cape Colony. As a result, Laidlaw is able to produce a volume that judiciously balances the colony and metropole while skilfully recovering the ‘traffic’ in ideas, information, and arguments that traversed the empire.

It has been customary to seee James Stephen's assumption of the position of the permanent under-secretary of Colonial Office in 1836 as triggering a bureaucratic revolution that rooted out ‘Old Corruption’ and displaced long-established traditions of administration that were strongly dependent on personal connections. Laidlaw offers a more sophisticated treatment of the transformation of colonial governance, drawing attention to two changes that had longer gestations and wider implications for the empire. First, the key lines of political patronage increasingly shifted from the metropole to the periphery as influential figures in the Colonial Office recognized the need for colonial communities to have a greater stake in their own governance. Even as officials in Britain remained fearful that Britons in the colonies might ultimately refuse to recognize the ultimate authority of the British constitution, they saw the benefits in allowing colonists to have an increased stake in local administration. Second, there was a shift in the culture of governance as impersonal bureaucratic processes that institutionalized knowledge production displaced informal personal networks. A key marker of this sensibility was the new authority attached to statistics within the colonial information order. As tables and numbers flooded into the Colonial Office – recording changing patterns of migration, the progress of colonial land sales, the extension of agriculture in the colonies, and the state of the ‘Aborigines’ – a larger cohort of civil servants were required to process this empire of information. As the Colonial Office expanded, it also became increasingly professionalized and, in turn, these new civil servants further extended the reach of statistics in governance. This new official knowledge began to produce a regularized, abstract, and coherent vision of the empire that was much less dependent on the connections of kin, faith, and shared service.

In reconstructing these shifts, Colonial connections offers many insights. Its sustained treatment of the awkward position of colonial governors as mediators between metropolitan institutions and colonial pressures is a particularly important contribution to our understanding of imperial political economy. More broadly, the administrational sinews of empire are revealed by Laidlaw's examination of the changing culture of correspondence and the value attached to statistics as instruments for assessing colonial progress and the efficiency of governance. It will be interesting to see how work on other colonial sites might enrich or challenge Laidlaw's arguments, and the implications of her thesis also deserve careful consideration for any future work on the imperial crises of the 1850s and 1860s and the nature of subsequent imperial reconstruction.

II

While gender and sexuality were largely marginal to the original five-volume Oxford history of the British Empire (OHBE), it has been absolutely central in recent work on colonialism and empire building. Philippa Levine's Gender and empire is, somewhat ironically, a ‘companion volume’ to that series and it offers important redress for the OHBE's almost total occlusion of gendered analysis.Footnote ¹² In many ways, Levine's introductory essay is the single most important element in the volume, as it offers a cogent and punchy case for the importance of gender as an analytical category. Kathleen Wilson, Catherine Hall, and Barbara Bush each provide lean, yet comprehensive, overviews of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, but it is a shame that there is no essay dealing with the earlier centuries of empire building. A comprehensive set of thematic essays map both the historical and historiographical terrain of gender relations within the empire. A striking feature of these pieces is the emphasis they place on gendered violence, especially in the powerful essays by Jock McCulloch and Urvashi Butalia. Antoinette Burton's closing essay on archives and the writing of gendered histories of the empire can be profitably read alongside Levine's introduction and introduces some much-needed reflection on method and interpretation into the Oxford series.

Durba Ghosh's Sex and the family in colonial India is an important work that exemplifies the ways in which gendered analysis can illuminate the interfaces between the worlds of the family and politics and add considerable depth to our understanding of how cultural difference was imagined and ordered.Footnote ¹³ Ghosh reconstructs the changing shape of the families constructed by British men in India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, examining the family as both an affective formation and a socio-economic structure. Her particular focus is the mixed family of a British husband, native wife, and mixed-race children: this unit was fundamental to the operation of the EIC in the formative years of colonial rule. At the same time, these families were a potentially destabilizing presence that called the whiteness and Britishness of the Company into question. Ghosh shows the pressures that were brought to bear on these mixed families as Governors Cornwallis and Wellesley strove to make empire-building respectable by preventing the formation of new mixed families and stopping mixed-race subjects entering the civil service and military. She carefully demonstrates that this attempt to create social distance and confidently inscribe cultural boundaries was powerful, but never totally effective. She also undercuts arguments that see the racialization of colonial rule in India as the outcome of the 1857 rebellion and the subsequent reconstruction of British authority. Her study shows that foundational elements of colonial racial hierarchies were put in place much earlier as the bodies of native women became the site upon which the probity of colonial rule and the boundaries of Britishness were established.

Elizabeth Buettner's Empire families can be usefully read against Ghosh's volume.Footnote ¹⁴Empire families makes effective use of a range of English language sources and images to produce a substantial appraisal of middle-class English families in India during the first half of the twentieth century. It examines colonial childhoods, the separation between children and their parents that typically accompanied schooling, and the return of families ‘home’ to places like Bedford, Cheltenham, and Eastbourne. Buettner is a sympathetic interpreter of these transitions and her book is certainly an important contribution to our understanding of the extended spatial and social domain that the empire offered some British families. But by focusing so firmly on the middle rank of colonial families and not exploring the ‘poor whites’ that were the focus of David Arnold's pioneering work, Buettner's ability to explore class and race as relational categories is inhibited.Footnote ¹⁵Empire families tends to quarantine its subjects from the South Asian worlds in which they lived and, as a result, it has insufficiently engaged with a robust South Asian historiography around the family. Even though she offers a great deal of evidence about British anxieties about social relationships with South Asian servants, Buettner sees these servants as essentially existing outside the family where important studies in the South Asian context emphasize the centrality of servants in the socio-economic formation of the family.Footnote ¹⁶ It is very unfortunate that servants, and other South Asian actors, are reduced to the status of ‘significant others’ in this study, as she unapologetically notes that her work ‘does not pretend to provide Anglo-Indian or Indian perspectives about their encounters with British private life and family practices’.Footnote ¹⁷ While Ghosh lacks the rich archives that Buettner uses to considerable effect, her work proves more effective in reading the colonial family against both British and South Asian traditions.

III

The work of anthropologists and historians of colonialism has increasingly focused on questions of religion and landmark works, by John and Jean Comaroff, Susan Thorne, Catherine Hall, Jeffrey Cox, and Elizabeth Elbourne, have moved questions of religious belief and identification to the centre of the historiographical field.Footnote ¹⁸ Norman Etherington's edited collection Missions and empire – another of the so-called ‘companion volumes’ to the OHBE – is a very valuable collection, which breaks out of the narrow case-study mould to offer broader reflections around central interpretative questions.Footnote ¹⁹ While familiar ground is covered in Patricia Grimshaw and Peter Sherlock's discussion of women's participation in mission work, the role of indigenous converts, native teachers, and colonized Christians receives more innovative treatment in the volume, especially in the essays by Peggy Brock on ‘New Christians as evangelists’ and Robert Edgar on ‘New religious movements’. Edgar demonstrates the ways in which the racial inequalities that were frequently built into life on mission stations were a key context for the rise of new African churches that were committed to allowing Africans themselves to become institutional leaders. David Maxwell examines the growth in indigenous churches, particularly in Africa, and argues that various converts and native evangelists were able to disconnect Christianity and colonialism well before the formal onset of decolonization.

Important political issues relating to empire-building are also treated with care. Alan Lester, for instance, moves beyond the confines of missions per se to examine the often fraught relationships between humanitarians and white colonists. Lester reconstructs the brief moment in the 1830s and 1840s when humanitarians were able to mobilize their metropolitan political influence and their extensive transnational networks to push forward new initiatives for the protection of indigenous and colonized communities. Etherington's own essay focuses especially on education and medicine and he makes a strong case for revaluating the role of British missions in shaping the political terrain of modernity, suggesting that missions were ‘pioneers of modern welfare states and international Philanthropy’.Footnote ²⁰

Etherington's introduction extends this line of thought as it offers a provocative argument about evangelization and empire building. He suggests that the complexity and diversity of the missionary movement mean ‘the trajectories of missions and Empire hardly bear comparison’. In part at least, Etherington is responding to scholarship that he sees as producing a reductive equation of missionary work with colonialism. Here his treatment of that historiography is not entirely convincing, as he strips much of the complexity out of the arguments of scholars like Jean and John Comarroff. Rather than asserting that missionary activity produced a close connection between the ‘Bible and the Flag’, Etherington suggests that ‘although missions and the official Empire were quite different operations, they play related parts in a larger drama – the spread of modernization, globalization, and Western cultural hegemony’.Footnote ²¹

It is notable that both the Caribbean and Asia receive only limited treatment in the volume. The occlusion of the Caribbean means that crucial issues relating to slavery, the meaning of labour, and the mobility of non-white peoples within the empire are not considered. With regards to Asia, Robert Frykenberg offers an overview of the relationship between missionaries and colonial power in India, but there is only fleeting treatment of any part of Asia in the thematic essays. Given that the essays that dwell on Africa and the Pacific emphasize the centrality of literacy in the missionary project, the volume would have been enriched if there were more consideration given to the ways in which the existence of rich textual traditions and robust scribal cultures in Asian societies challenged established strategies for evangelization. Moreover, a sustained consideration of religious encounters in Asia would have allowed this volume to explore the place of the techniques and arguments of missionary Christianity in the reformulation and revival of Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, and Buddhism in the later nineteenth century.Footnote ²²

British missionaries were rarely successful in converting Asian communities to their faith in the Victorian period; however, their work as printers, pamphleteers, preachers, teachers, and ethnographers was central to the growing systematization of ‘religion’ as a global category of cultural and political identification and social analysis.Footnote ²³ Some of these dynamics are accessible through Amiya Sen's collection, Social and religious reform, that documents the transformation of Hinduism in British India.Footnote ²⁴ After providing an engaging introduction, Sen's volume offers forty-one source extracts, largely drawn from the writings of Indian religious reformers and political leaders with the addition of a few texts from Christian missionaries, colonial officials, and modern scholars. Sen's collection highlights the ways in which both foreign rule and the activities of Christian missionaries energized debates over the nature of South Asian beliefs. It also reveals how regional linguistic and political contexts, long-standing anxieties over gender and caste, and divergent understandings of appropriate forms of ritual practice fed a sequence of charged contests both within and between South Asian communities. What is clear from Sen's collection is that religion was indeed a central faultline in imperial culture, but this centrality was never simply the outcome of missionary activity.

IV

Several of the essays in Etherington's collection, like the monographs by Laidlaw and Bowen, exhibit an interest in the place of information gathering in the processes of empire building. In the wake of landmark works by Bernard Cohn and C. A. Bayly, imperial historians have been placing greater emphasis on the role of colonial knowledge in the creation and maintenance of imperial authority.Footnote ²⁵ Saul Dubow's A commonwealth of knowledge offers a reading of colonial knowledge production that places less emphasis than is customary on the use of knowledge to shore up colonial authority.Footnote ²⁶ While Dubow recognizes the political utility of colonial science, he produces a reading of colonial knowledge production that focuses on institutional development, associational cultures, and the cultural sensibilities of colonial science. His discussion of the imbrications between intellectual work, colonial institutions, and social identification in the Cape Colony is a reconstruction that should serve as a useful model for other scholars. The narrative he presents could have offered a fuller treatment of popular knowledge traditions and more fully assessed the intellectual lives of the colonial working class, white and non-white: it is striking that Dubow does not grapple with the South African manifestations of the radical intellectual traditions that emerged between 1890 and the 1930s throughout the empire. Dubow's strong emphasis on the Cape also means that this later treatment of ‘national’ science seems a little thin. Even though he does offer a thoughtful treatment of the tensions between Cape and Transvaal scientific institutions, Natal is not especially visible in the volume and this means that Dubow tends to gloss over regional divergences in the Victorian period and does not produce an entirely satisfactory account of the nationalization of intellectual life (and the limits of this process).

Kim A. Wagner's work on the construction and suppression of ‘Thuggee’ is a significant addition to our understanding of the knowledge/power nexus within the empire.Footnote ²⁷ Wagner navigates a path through a bifurcated historiographical field. A significant body of postcolonial work has seen thuggee as a colonial construction that expressed EIC anxieties over the limits of colonial power. A smaller body of work grounded in social history has identified it as a tradition of banditry that emerged out of the conjuncture of deep-seated transformations in the economy of north India and newer dislocations produced by the EIC's drive to extend the agricultural frontier, demobilize peasant soldiers, and disarm the populace. The position Wagner stakes out is closer to this social history approach, as he fashions an engaging microhistory of social banditry in the Indian context. Carefully marshalling his archival material, Wagner convincingly demonstrates that banditry generated a flow of capital to local zamindars (landholders) who acted as the patrons of groups of thugs and it generated additional income and real protection for the families of ryots (peasant farmers). This detailed work, together with some convincing readings of the narratives produced by ‘approvers’ (thugs recruited by the British as informers), convincingly undercuts the thesis that thuggee was simply a colonial fantasy. He is certainly aware of the ways in which British officials attempted to deploy thuggee for various political and religious ends. But even here, his careful analysis emphasizes complexity. He demonstrates, for example, the divergent institutional responses within the colonial state to thuggee, noting that although reports from frontier districts caused EIC administrators in Bengal a great deal of anxiety, the judges in the Nizamat Adalat, the highest criminal court, were sceptical about the reality of the phenomena. This reminds us that we must guard against readings of colonialism that see the colonial state or even particular sectors of the state as institutions automatically unified by coherent visions of their own power and the nature of the communities they ruled over.

Daniel Rycroft's Representing rebellion explores the connections between Victorian visual culture and British colonialism in India.Footnote ²⁸ Drawing very heavily from Ranajit Guha's influential analysis of colonial power and its limits, Rycroft examines the ways in which sketches, drawings, and lithographs were used to shore up Britain's shaky authority in South Asia. Essentially Rycroft utilizes Guha's work to interrogate how South Asia was visually presented to British audiences through periodicals, especially the Illustrated London News, during the Ceylon rebellion of 1848, the Great Exhibition of 1851, and the Santhal hul (insurrection) of 1855–6. The final chapter offers an assessment of the place of Rycroft's key artist, the revenue surveyor and economic geologist, Walter Sherwill, in the operation of colonial power. Although theoretical schemas overly encumber the monograph, Rycroft successfully embeds Sherwill's work as an artist in the broader trajectory of his role as an influential producer of colonial knowledge. Rycroft offers some convincing readings of British images of South Asia and adds some depth to our understanding of the reconstruction of imperial power in the wake of localized rebellions. But unfortunately he devotes little effort to discussing the circulation and reception of these images of the uprisings that British periodicals offered their readers: this means it is very hard to gauge what Peter Mandler has termed the ‘relative throw’, that is ‘the weight and significance’, of these cultural productions.Footnote ²⁹ This lack of concern for the operation of metropolitan print culture actually limits Rycroft's ability to produce a convincing account of the production of authority within the extended political domain of empire.

Heather Streets's Martial races examines the connections between knowledge and imperial authority in the wake of the rebellion of 1857.Footnote ³⁰ This monograph supplants David Omissi's The sepoy and the Raj as the best treatment of this particular tradition of military thought and recruitment.Footnote ³¹ Moving beyond a simple stress on representation, Streets presents an expansive history of the belief that certain communities had a natural martial prowess, reconstructing the place of Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Highlanders in British military thought and practice. She foregrounds questions of race and gender in her analysis, but also pays close attention to the economic and strategic context of changing recruitment patterns. Two of the strongest features of Martial races are its assessments of the deployment of the racially gendered language of martial race theories throughout the empire and her demonstration of the ways in which these beliefs were increasingly naturalized ‘at home’ in Britain. Streets is deft in her use of the archives produced by British officers and soldiers and effectively deploys a range of material to explore the perspectives of Highlanders who entered British service. But partially because of archival constraints, she generally relies on British texts to articulate the views of Sikhs and the Gurkhas. There is, in fact, a significant body of accessible work that explores the broader religious, intellectual, and social context that encouraged Sikhs themselves to be deeply invested in military service and concerned about the religious boundaries. It is a little unfortunate that Streets does not engage with Harjot Oberoi's landmark study of the transformation of Sikhism in the nineteenth century. This is not a simply bibliographic gripe. Rather Oberoi's work challenged the assertion that army officers and military recruiters were central in the production of Sikh identity, an argument forwarded in Richard Fox's Lions of the Punjab, a reductionist and instrumental reading of social change under colonialism that Streets does cite.Footnote ³² It is also surprising that Streets does not engage with the very important arguments of Dirk Kolff's Naukar, Rajput, and sepoy, a rich ethnohistory of the South Asian military market up to 1850, which demonstrated that military service shaped social identification in South Asia well before the rise of the EIC.Footnote ³³

Colonial knowledge has assumed an increasingly important position in scholarship on British empire building in the Pacific. Sujit Sivasundaram's Nature and the godly empire is a key contribution to this developing line of enquiry.Footnote ³⁴ This richly textured monograph examines the connections between scientific knowledge and practice and the work of the London Missionary Society (LMS) in Polynesia. Sivasundaram convincingly argues that the understandings of the natural world that missionaries brought to the Pacific were central to the ideology of the mission. Missionaries believed that both their faith and understanding of the processes that shaped the natural world were important markers of their superiority to Pacific peoples and that this knowledge would be an essential tool for ‘improving’ Pacific cultures. Agents of the LMS tried to cultivate an alternative theology of nature to displace traditional knowledge systems, which missionaries saw as irrational and inefficient. Missionaries encouraged their native teachers, congregants, and pupils to follow their own example and study nature, adopt the ‘rational religion’ of evangelical Christianity, and work hard to improve themselves, their communities, and the landscapes that they lived in. In this project, the study of nature provided missionaries with a powerful set of analogies that could be deployed in explaining the progress of individual and community spiritual life, from conversion to death. These ways of weaving together faith and science, according to Sivasundaram, produced a particular missionary cosmology that drew upon Enlightenment thought, popular natural history, evangelical social teaching, and the Bible itself. This was a distinctive form of knowledge that was moulded by empire. Even though evangelicals could be fierce critics of the excesses of slavery and colonialism, the extension of Britain's imperial reach into the Pacific opened the way for what Sivasundaram terms ‘providential colonialism’.Footnote ³⁵ Against this backdrop, Sivasundaram suggests that missionaries were generally convinced that God's hand was responsible for the growth of the empire and the superiority of their own knowledge system.

Sivasundaram offers some rich insights into missionary print culture, ethnographic writing, and their practices as collectors. Generally, he moves effectively from the Pacific to London, although he underplays the extent to which his account of ‘indigenous agency’ is mediated by evangelical textual culture. A more detailed and considered treatment of traditional social structures and indigenous understandings of the relationships between the natural and supernatural world would have added further depth and complexity to this important study.

One of the most compelling parts of Sivasundaram's monograph is his reconstruction of the collecting practices and networks of exchange that underpinned the operation of the LMS missionary museum in London. The movement of objects is also a central concern in Amiria Henare's Museums, anthropology, and imperial exchange.Footnote ³⁶ This historical ethnography of museums in New Zealand and Scotland traces the movement of artifacts through space and time. While Henare is interested in tracing the connections between these objects and the development of ethnological and anthropological thought, in actuality she uses histories of imperial exchange to reject anthropological models grounded in semiotic and linguistic theory and to urge a return to the study of material objects, which she sees as anthropology's proper concern. Henare does offer some illuminating readings of both artifacts and museums, but the analytical framework of the study is not firmly anchored in recent Pacific scholarship, nor does it engage in any sustained way with work by historians of empire on the operation of networks of exchange. The first person narratives that Henare employs tend to be disruptive and impede the development of analysis. Most importantly, however, Henare's discussion of both Te Papa (the national museum of New Zealand) and the Museum of Scotland reveals a rather uncritical reading of the ways in which projects of nation-building mobilize objects and museums. Henare is dismissive of critics of Te Papa, who were uneasy about that Museum's ‘bicultural’ organization: yet, that very schema means that the complex exchanges that linked both Maori and colonists to the Pacific (and other regions) are systematically occluded by the presentation of an inward-looking national story. Moreover, in celebrating the Museum of Scotland's representation of an ‘ancestral past’, Henare does not acknowledge that the Museum's presentation of a coherent and self-contained national story that stresses resistance against England, marginalizes important histories of co-operation and interchange that transect the border.Footnote ³⁷ In both cases, Henare prioritizes the nation's control of a past, and the production of a new postcolonial, reading of national history over the types of exchange that are supposedly at the heart of the monograph.

V

Sivasundaram's and Henare's emphasis on exchange reflects a new consensus amongst many, if not all, historians of empire that reconstructing the movement of plants and animals, people, capital, commodities, information, and ideas is fundamental to understanding how the empire developed and how it operated on a day to day basis. Working within the framework of the ‘Atlantic world’, Douglas Hamilton's monograph charts growing Scottish engagement with the Caribbean, as Scottish economic activity was reoriented away from Europe and towards the Atlantic in the wake of the Act of Union in 1707.Footnote ³⁸ Hamilton suggests that a distinctive group of Scots went to the Caribbean: young single men who were generally more affluent than the Scots colonists in North America. They were not driven by economic necessity, but rather travelled to the West Indies in search of commercial knowledge and economic benefit. This was experience that they hoped to invest at home, developing the land and Scotland's industrial capacity.

Throughout the work, Hamilton strives to locate individuals within their familial and economic networks, arguing that the ‘clannishness’ that many eighteenth-century observers identified was in fact a reworking of a set of long-standing, yet flexible, kin and regional connections in the colonies.Footnote ³⁹ These ties not only provided social connection but also offered employment opportunities, outlets for investment, and a degree of security within the risk-laden realm of Atlantic commerce. He also demonstrates the ways in which patronage and political power operated within these networks, creating a generally convincing portrait of a political domain spanning the Atlantic.

At the heart of the book is the constant movement of people, capital, and goods across the Atlantic. Hamilton is committed to assessing the impact of these patterns of circulation on Scotland as well as the Caribbean. He shows that the capital generated in the Atlantic trade and on the ground in the Caribbean had a substantial impact in Scotland. It extended the landholdings of some key old families and pushed up the price of land. It was a crucial element in funding the agricultural revolution during the later eighteenth century and, at the same time, also drove forward the growth of Scottish industry. Most importantly, some Scottish companies were able to create chains of economic linkages where they oversaw the production of cotton on West Indian plantations, sent that commodity home to Scotland on their ships, and ran mills in the west of Scotland that processed cotton. Like Bowen, Hamilton suggests that, in the later eighteenth century, the empire had a substantial and sustained impact at ‘home’, asserting that Scottish endeavour in the West Indies meant ‘that people in all walks of life, and in all parts of Scotland, were in some way affected by Caribbean involvement’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Robert Blyth's The empire of the Raj offers another approach to the history of imperial connections.Footnote ⁴¹ In this careful monograph, Blyth examines the extensive political reach of British India, including its influence over the Tehran mission, the operation of the British Indian Agency at Zanzibar, its role in the debates over Aden, and its vision for East Africa and the Middle East in the 1910s and 1920s. At the heart of the book is a series of detailed accounts of how competing departmental aspirations and bureaucratic politics were brought to bear from London, Calcutta, New Delhi, and Bombay on the making of imperial policy. The empire of the Raj not only reconstructs the development of the ‘Indian sphere’ in the western Indian Ocean but also briefly points to some of the ways in which ‘empire of the Raj’ transformed the terrain of Indian politics by elevating overseas military service and the experience of South Asians in East Africa as important points of contention for nationalist leaders. Blyth tends to confine these issues to the fickle world of bureaucratic rivalries and diplomatic manoeuvring, presenting a reading of the world of policy making as largely self-contained. Embedding these wrangles more firmly in the operation of inter-regional trading systems, information flows, and the cultural vision of both British officials and South Asian political leaders would have enriched Blyth's analysis and forced him to bring his parliamentary papers, India Office and Colonial Office records, and Foreign Department archives into a more sustained dialogue with colonial print culture. While the volume's subtitle Eastern Africa and the Middle East, 1850–1947 promises broad analytical vistas, Blyth remains firmly focused on his small cadre of white officials. Ultimately, this work will be most useful if it is read alongside the more expansive recent works by Thomas Metcalf, Sugata Bose, Priya Satia, and the important edited collection by Leila Fawaz and C. A. Bayly on the continuities and connections between the Mediterranean and India in this period.Footnote ⁴²

Jessica Harland-Jacob's Builders of empire is a wider-ranging study, examining the place of Freemasonry in British empire building between 1717 to 1927.Footnote ⁴³ While the geographical and chronological breadth of this book certainly means that some significant issues are not treated at length, its broad canvas allows Harland-Jacobs to present a compelling analysis of the symbiotic relationship between Masonry and empire. She suggests that, during the nineteenth century, Freemasonry was transformed from being a fundamentally inclusive and cosmopolitan associational tradition, which saw its members as ‘citizens of the world’, into a series of institutions that were grounded in a restricted vision of fraternity. In the wake of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, Masonry was rebuilt around an overwhelmingly white membership that was welded together by a Protestant and middle-class ethic and an increasingly explicit loyalty to the British monarchy. This momentous shift, Harland-Jacobs argues, made Freemasonry an important feature of both processes of building colonial societies and the networks that helped give shape and substance to the empire.

Builders of Empire required a more direct treatment of the overall significance of Masonry within the vigorous associational cultures that developed in colonial societies during the Victorian period. It is also important to note that Harland-Jacobs's argument about the essentially white and Protestant nature of Victorian Masonry sits uneasily in South Asia. Vahid Fozdar has shown that, in India, Masons were not especially successful in constructing the kind of religious and racial boundaries that Harland-Jacobs emphasizes. From the middle of the nineteenth century, Masonry in India was a racially mixed tradition and by 1900, more Indians than Britons were entering lodges in western India.Footnote ⁴⁴ Harland-Jacobs herself notes that while British Masons in India were resistant to the inclusion of South Asians in their lodges in the early nineteenth century, by the 1890s multiracial lodges were not unusual. At the same time, it seems that some white Masons in India and other colonies were actively drawn to heterodox religious practices well beyond the pale of Protestantism.Footnote ⁴⁵ These instances suggest that the transition to a religiously and racially exclusive form of Masonry was not quite as complete, at least in some colonies, as suggested by Builders of empire.

One of the most important works that provides a template for thinking about the empire as a transnational formation is David Lambert and Alan Lester's Colonial Lives across the British empire.Footnote ⁴⁶ Exploring the idea of ‘imperial careering’, this collection examines the ‘imperial lives’ of governors and their wives, missionaries, a nurse, a poet, and a mercenary. It suggests that thinking through life histories is a powerful way of reconstructing imperial webs or networks and recovering the role of these connections in the making and remaking of imperial culture. Lambert and Lester's introduction is especially significant, offering a thoughtful historiographical overview of the transnational turn in recent work on the empire. The claims of the collection would have been even stronger if several life stories of mobile indigenous or colonized peoples had been presented: the complexity and contradictions of the imperial system come most sharply into focus when we think about the mobility of white and non-white subjects within the same frame.Footnote ⁴⁷

Lambert and Lester's volume can be very fruitfully read alongside Catherine Hall and Sonya Rose's At home with the empire.Footnote ⁴⁸ In the face of consistent challenges to the idea that imperialism was a powerful force that shaped British culture, these essays assess the place of the empire in a range of cultural spaces and practices within the United Kingdom and Ireland. These essays are consistently concerned with the ways in which the empire inflected the production of difference, including a compelling essay by Christine Kinealy on the place of Ireland in the British imagination and Laura Tabili's survey of changing responses to ‘internal others’, ranging from Jews and Germans to Afro-Caribbean and South Asian migrants. Susan Thorne and Joanna de Groot examine the place of empire in everyday life in their essays on religion and the culture of consumption respectively. Antoinette Burton, Keith McClelland, and Sonya Rose offer weighty essays that examine the place of imperial issues and colonial cross-currents in British politics, presenting powerful cases that metropolitan politics were not entirely isolated from debates over authority and rights in the colonies. Collectively, these essays show that, at particular moments, the empire became a central and contentious preoccupation in Britain. But they also demonstrate that the empire was frequently a significant force in the cultural background, shaping practices, beliefs, and worldviews in quiet ways. This is an important insight that pushes historians away from using simple measures of ‘visibility’ to gauge cultural impact to a position that is more appreciative of the naturalization of difference and the exotic.

VI

Over the past decade scholarship around the end of the empire has also grown at a rapid pace as scholars have emphasized the messy, decidedly uneven, and ultimately incomplete dismantling of the empire. Although senior British officials and bureaucrats in the 1940s and 1950s suggested that decolonization was the logical outcome of British colonial policy and believed that the ‘transfer of power’ to the colonies had generally gone well, recent scholarship has produced a much more sceptical reading of decolonization. Proclamations such as Mountbatten's claim that he had presided over ‘one of the greatest administrative operations in history’ now seem both vain and profoundly misleading. Anthropologists, literary scholars, feminist critics, and historians in South Asia have recovered the centrality of rape, violence, and displacement in Partition and stress the long-term consequences of these traumas on political culture and social relations in independent South Asia.Footnote ⁴⁹ Caroline Elkins's study of the British drive to suppress the Mau Mau in Kenya has provoked some controversy as it provided new evidence of what she termed Britain's ‘gulag’ in Kenya, documenting the systematic use of violence, torture, and detainment by the British during the Kenyan Emergency between 1952 and 1960.Footnote ⁵⁰ C. A. Bayly and Tim Harper have shown that the granting of independence in South Asia was seen by key British officials as an exceptional case, not the colonial rule. They have convincingly demonstrated that Southeast Asia took on a new significance in post-war imperial thought. British influence in Southeast Asia was seen as being central to the recovery of the domestic economy and as the foundation for both a reconfigured empire and the perpetuation of Britain's ‘Great Power’ status. Bayly and Harper argue that these ambitions drove Britain to wage a second colonial subjugation of Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁵¹

Increasingly, work on the end of empire is recovering new connections between movements that have traditionally been framed within national analytical frameworks and is rematerializing the global, if uneven, reach of influential anti-colonial activists, leaders, and thinkers. These kinds of studies are prizing open our received understandings of imperial decline and the nature of politics as a global domain of exchange and contestation. Particularly important here is Mrinalina Sinha's Specters of Mother India.Footnote ⁵² This monograph examines the international controversy triggered by the publication of Mother India (1927), an exposé of Indian social problems by the American journalist, Katherine Mayo. Sinha reconstructs the expansive set of connections that Mayo fashioned in India, America, and Britain. She also shows that, in producing Mother India, Mayo was particularly reliant on Indian social reformers, especially Cornelia Sorabji, who was Mayo's chief informant and furnished much of the evidence that Mayo marshalled in Mother India. Mayo produced an image of India as backward, weak, and helpless. The figure of the Indian woman carried much of the burden for this representational strategy and Mayo's stress on the systematic marginalization of women had clear political ramifications: India was not ready for independence or even greater autonomy from Britain.

As Sinha demonstrates, the sprawling international controversy triggered by Mayo's work was a catalyst for new legislation aimed at redefining marriage and political rights and was an important driver of the reconfiguration of the political and social spheres in colonial India. Most significantly, Sinha presents a compelling argument that, in the wake of this controversy, women were no longer simply subsumed into the various religious communities that were the building blocks of the colonial imagination and political debate in India, but were imagined instead as a clear and distinct group in their own right. This work is of great importance for two reasons: first, it is an extremely careful delineation of the intersections between ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ and, second, it prizes open imperial history by presenting a truly global reading of India's mobilization in international exchanges over the relationships between gender and rights.

While these explicitly transnational approaches are reconfiguring our understandings of the end of empire, significant work continues to be carried out on diplomatic records and the ‘official mind’. The collection of essays edited by the late Martin Lynn, The British empire in the 1950s, casts new light on a decade in the empire's history that has drawn less scholarly energy than either the 1940s or 1960s. Lynn's engaging introduction notes that the 1950s were a messy passage in the empire's transformation: retreat and revival co-existed, and the empire was shrouded in a cloudy mix of ‘ambiguity, contradictions, conflicting aims and objects’.Footnote ⁵³ The essays that make up this collection communicate the diverse pressures that shaped British foreign policy and the divergent pathways to decolonization that took shape, especially in Africa, during the 1950s. In an important essay that opens the volume, John Darwin offers a punchy summation of the consequences of the Second World War for the empire

But, as Darwin and several other contributors show, Britain's parlous finances and diminished standing on the global stage did not necessarily destroy a commitment to the project of empire, and many business leaders, colonial officials, and politicians believed that the empire remained an important instrument for shoring up both national power and global influence. The absence of sustained consideration in the volume of either the Malayan or the Kenyan ‘emergencies’ means that key instances of violence, coercion, and suppression are not as prominent as they deserve to be in The British empire in the 1950s. This is a case where the individual chapters are impressive, but the volume as a whole does not sufficiently grapple with some key conflicts and, as a result, produces a vision of the empire that is a little too bloodless.

Lynn's collection ends with a typically argumentative essay by Stephen Howe that suggests that neither imperial revival nor retreat had much impact on Britain during the 1950s, arguing that the empire was relatively insignificant in metropolitan life. In a powerful restatement of what Stuart Ward has termed the ‘minimal impact thesis’, Howe posits that cultural flows from the empire did not profoundly reshape popular taste.Footnote ⁵⁵ Nor did colonial crises, such as the Mau Mau, have any significant impact on metropolitan political and cultural life. Here, of course, Howe fails to take into account flows of knowledge, commodities, and products from the empire that had long been regular parts of British life – such as meat from New Zealand and wheat from Canada and Australia – which were re-established after the Second World War. And most importantly, his argument is too quick to discount the tremendous long-term significance of the Afro-Caribbean and Punjabi, Sylheti, and Mirpuri migrants who filled crucial gaps in the labour market and formed the nuclei of important new diasporic communities that made their home in Britain. It is also worth remembering that the white riots in Nottingham and Notting Hill in 1958 revealed deep-seated anxieties amongst some Britons over the changing relationships between colony and metropole. Of course, these outbreaks of violence – which were peppered with cries of ‘lynch the blacks’ – could be framed within a longer sequence of anti-Asian and Black riots in Liverpool (1948), Deptford and Birmingham (1949), and then in Middlesborough (1961). But they could also be fruitfully read against the crisis triggered by the desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1957 or the calcification of the apartheid regime in South Africa.

Wendy Webster's Englishness and empire draws attention to the 1958 riots and notes that British commentators drew these international analogies.Footnote ⁵⁶ Where the historians gathered by Lynn ably work through the official archives of the Colonial Office and Foreign Office, Webster explores a host of archival materials, print culture artifacts, television programmes, and films to produce a richly textured reading of the impact of imperial decline on British culture between 1939 and 1965. This work, which can be fruitfully read alongside Stuart Ward's arguments that decolonization was a shock to British self-perceptions and resonated widely in British popular culture, patiently piles up a vast body of empirical evidence.Footnote ⁵⁷ In rematerializing this archive, Englishness and empire is a significant work, given that one of the chief criticisms of the new imperial history's stress on the empire's impact on metropolitan culture has been its lack of ‘hard evidence’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Webster identifies three key narratives that framed popular thinking about empire in Britain. The first mobilized egalitarianism, a common concern with welfare, and ideas of development in a vision of the ‘people's empire’, which was a powerful notion during wartime and the early 1950s. Webster shows that this idea faded in the mid-1950s as the Kenyan and Malayan emergencies punctured any idealized vision of a contented multiracial Commonwealth. The ‘people's empire’ initially collided with, and then was displaced by, a second narrative, which was the long-standing tendency to juxtapose a stable, quiet, and domesticated national identity with the exotic, rebellious, and dangerous empire. This narrative of an ‘England under siege’ was powerfully mobilized in the face of non-white immigrants to Britain, as modern ‘little Englanders’ saw the empire as a threat to their nation, which they imagined as a sanctuary of private domesticity. The third narrative Webster identifies was also explicitly gendered: but where the siege narrative imagined England as a vulnerable female, the narrative of ‘national greatness’ was grounded in a heroic British masculinity which was largely, but not entirely, forged in the domains of empire.

In tracing the development and operation of these narratives, Webster offers an engaging reading of the changing shape and texture of metropolitan culture. This is a very judicious work and Webster is careful to recognize the interaction between imperial and non-imperial elements in British cultural forms and this is well demonstrated in her deft treatment of the connections between the decline of working-class communities and the loss of the romantic world of empire in the work of John Osborne. The range of Webster's research and the generally sensitive and nuanced nature of her analysis means that this is a most important study of the culture of empire at ‘home’.

The impact of imperial decline and decolonization on Canada is explored in eighteen essays in a collection edited by Phillip Buckner.Footnote ⁵⁹ Each essay explores a specific aspect of Canada's relationship with Britain in the post-war period and, taken together, they document a wide range of reactions to Britain's loss of colonies and diminished standing on the world stage. Important essays by George Richardson and Paul Rutherford examine Britain's persistent cultural imprint in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s through examinations of the school curricula and the Anglophone elite's continued attachment to British culture as an antidote to ‘American vulgarity’. The ways in which the economic muscle and growing cultural power of the United States mediated Canadian relationships with Britain runs through the volume. Allan Smith notes the ways in which American influences contributed to a growing Canadian sense that Britain was no longer a world leader in the creative and performing arts, while Gordon T. Stewart highlights the USA's strong interest in the erosion of Canadian–British economic connections. Unfortunately, the ways in which Quebec and Francophone cultural traditions complicated Canadian relationships with Britain receive no sustained treatment in the collection, nor does any essay grapple with the relationships between empire and migration in the post-war transformation of Canada. The absence of these issues produces a picture of an almost entirely white, Anglophone Canada when much recent research on colonialism in Canada has worked very hard to unseat that tradition of representation.Footnote ⁶⁰

The complexities of decolonization are further underlined in recent work that examines the role of particular British professional groups in the transfer of power. Georgina Sinclair's At the end of the line is a deeply researched evaluation of the transformation of policing during decolonization.Footnote ⁶¹ Sinclair traces the development and dissemination of various policing models and methods across the empire, as colonial states attempted to quell resistance as well as planning for the creation of new independent police forces. Sinclair's study might have offered an even richer argument if it more fully countenanced the reverse flow of colonial models and expertise, tracing the ways in which colonial models of riot control were picked up in Britain and reconstructing the metropolitan careers of former colonial policemen who made their names suppressing dissent at the edge of empire.

Tackling another prominent feature of the imperial social formation, Brian Stanley has edited a rich collection of essays exploring the ways in which missionaries navigated the rise of anti-colonial nationalism and the end of empire.Footnote ⁶² Adrian Hastings offers a very rich examination of the connections between theology, missionary institutions, and the political domain, demonstrating the tensions that missionaries commonly faced as local Christian leaders and congregationalists were increasingly drawn into nationalist movements which offered fierce critiques of European imperialism. Daniel Bays's case study of local Protestant leaders in twentieth-century China explores a similar set of tensions, as Christians increasingly operated within a political climate energized by anti-imperialism and in which missionaries and Christianity were routinely framed as alien impositions. Taken as a whole, the collection not only captures the dilemmas that missionaries confronted as a result of political transformations that they could not control, but it also suggests that the interfaces between theology, the social world of the missions, and anti-colonial political ideologies require more serious appraisal.

VII

The large body of research surveyed in this article is representative of the shape of imperial history as a field and we can see the work engaging with a set of key issues. Although Bowen's work suggests the ability of the history of commerce to generate new analytical insights, it is clear that economic questions, which enjoyed primary position in the work of earlier generations, are engaging proportionally fewer scholars than issues relating to colonialism as a cultural project.

At the moment, culturally grounded approaches to the empire are structured around three primary concerns. First, they stress the importance of knowledge production in the constitution of colonial difference and place increasing emphasis on information management as a key element of imperial authority. Second, they underscore the centrality of cultural difference in both the ideological facade of the empire and the everyday practices that shaped imperial cultural formations. Recent work has not only moved gender to the centre of the analytical field, but has increasingly emphasized the weight of religion as well as race in encoding hierarchies of cultural value. Third, webbed or networked conceptions which imagine the empire as a set of shifting, uneven, and often unstable inter-regional and global connections have supplemented, and are perhaps beginning to displace, the new imperial history's initial concern with bringing metropole and colony into a single analytical field. This approach is beginning to recover some of the important practices and pathways that linked colonies and that also reached out of the British imperial system into other empires and agents of long-distance connection. As I suggested above, a key challenge that lies ahead for this new approach to is recover the participation of various colonized groups and non-white diasporic communities in these webs and to remain sensitive to the occlusions and gaps within these patterns of exchange.

Let me conclude by expressing a concern over the tendency for some works within the field to offer a thin treatment of pre-colonial social structures, economic practices, and mentalities. This not only dilutes the analysis such work offers, but it also makes it difficult to assess how processes of commercial expansion, evangelization, and colonialism proceeded and gained traction. Historians of empire need to exhibit a persistent commitment to assessing the sociology and mentalities of pre-colonial life if they are to identify the anchor points and bridgeheads upon which colonial power was built. If the social structure, power relations, cultural practices, and the pre-existing patterns of social change within colonized communities are not fully countenanced or even discounted, historians produce readings of colonialism that can easily misread the extent to which colonialism changed things. But this omission also allows historians to see the British as always being the primary historical actors, unfettered and unchanged by the communities they interacted with and ruled over. We need to examine carefully the ways in which colonial regimes were forced to accommodate themselves to certain indigenous beliefs and practices, even as they worked to suppress other elements of local culture, contain dissent, and broadly reshape the socio-economic order. In particular, we need more thorough evaluations of the interaction between indigenous and colonial cultural hierarchies and ways of ordering difference.

As historians of empire, we always must be prepared to identify the boundaries of colonial power and, ultimately, the limits of colonialism as an explanatory tool. I am convinced that British empire-building transformed the prospects of many human communities and played a central role in shaping capitalism and modernity. Nevertheless, the significance of pre-colonial tradition, the persistence of conflicts within colonized communities, and the operation of non-imperial networks over long distances mean that colonialism frequently remains an important, but insufficient explanation for social change in colonial spaces. Colonialism illuminates many key issues, but we must remain aware of the significance of other dynamics – whether at the local, regional, or global level – that made and remade communities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.